My Forbidden Desire by Carolyn Jewel

little better. Very little. Having a weapon was good.
    More wood broke. They were here. Inside. Right now.
    In the kitchen, something screamed.

    Chapter 5
    X ia came back into Alexandrine’s kitchen from the rear stairs where he’d kicked the little freak who broke the door. His buddies were farther down the stairs, waiting. They’d gotten in where there were lots of shadows to hide them from vision-poor humans. Windows to climb through. A narrow staircase to sneak up. Whatever mage was responsible for this attempt—and Xia still had his money on Rasmus even though he hadn’t recognized any of the attackers—he’d let his magehelds do the dirty work. No surprise there. That’s what mages did, right? They sent their enslaved fiends to kill or be killed. He figured one or two other magehelds had likely died breaking through his proofing outside the building, leaving four survivors to smash the laundry room window once the way was clear. Poor fucks. They hadn’t gotten far. At least their deaths had been less painful than the ones who’d died outside.
    He didn’t think there’d be more right away. He knew the drill. The ones he hadn’t killed would slink off and talk about what went wrong and why, and either wait for further orders from their mage or bring on reinforcements. And if that was the case, they’d be in already. Which meant they were waiting for Rasmus to tell them what to do next. He figured he had twenty or thirty minutes of peace and quiet.
    Xia rolled his shoulders and stopped at the sink to wash his hands and face. It felt good to fight with complete freedom. Without the aching, bone-deep pain of compulsion. Without hatred burning through him. The difference unsettled him. Until now, he’d not realized, not completely, how alien his freedom was to him. Talk about messed up. He’d done nothing but dream about freedom, and now that he had it, he didn’t know how to live. In a sick way, he was grateful to be babysitting Harsh’s sister, because it gave him something to think about besides what he was supposed to do with his freedom now that it belonged to him again.
    The lights were back to normal, but he didn’t turn any on. He liked the dark, and besides, he didn’t have any problem seeing. He ran the water extra long, waiting until well past the time when it was hot. Extra soap for him. The smell of copper echoed in his mouth, a sweet tang of blood on his tongue.
    While he waited for the sink to clear of blood, he found a glass and got a drink of water from a bottle in the fridge. Cool and wet down the back of his throat. Whenever he was coming down from high alert, he was hyper-aware of his surroundings. His proofing was back in place and felt good and solid, given the time he’d had in which to work. First-class proofing took days, and he’d had less than an hour to redo what he’d managed to put in place in the time he’d been here. Not to mention the limitation of having to wait until the witch was asleep before he got to work.
    He returned to the sink and let his senses expand. None of the free kin were around besides him. Carson and Nikodemus were tucked away in the back of his head, and it was comforting to feel them. If he cared to, he could reach out to Kynan or Iskander. He could even touch Harsh, who sometimes stank of magekind.
    He’d always been sensitive to the magekind, witches in particular. If Alexandrine Marit’s place was full of vanilla humans, he’d still know exactly where she was. Right now, she was in the living room, about a yard from that sissy couch of hers. She made his skin itch. But there was something else here, too. Besides the stink of witch. He concentrated. Given his current sensitive state, which he expected would last another hour at least, he could make out more than before.
    For sure Harsh’s sister was coming into some power from the talisman, but she was still a lot more human than witch. Not that it mattered to him. Practicing or not, she was a